Texas Restaurant Association

News flash: Texans love to go out to eat.

That’s why we spend more than $50 billion/year at restaurants. It’s why 12% of the state’s entire workforce is in the foodservice industry.

And it’s why the Texas Restaurant Association has a full plate.

The Texas Restaurant Association (TRA) advocates for the 1.2 million chefs, servers, restaurateurs, managers, suppliers, and hospitality experts who call Texas home. But in order to effectively serve 1.2 million professionals, TRA needed a website that was up to the task.

The Appetizer

We wanted to help TRA connect with the next generation of restaurant professionals—the women and men who are already redefining the restaurant industry in Texas.

At the same time, a new website couldn’t be superficial razzle dazzle.

TRA generates an enormous amount of content for its members—e.g., updates on new laws and regulations, statewide and regional events, examinations of new industry practices, profiles of movers and shakers, etc. All of this content needed to be clearly organized and easily managed on the back-end.

The Main Course

We began by helping TRA develop an intuitive information architecture—grouping, prioritizing, and laying out their massive stores of content in a way that makes sense to the “average” TRA prospect or member.

Atop this streamlined site structure, our designers painted a beautiful new visual identity for TRA—emphasizing the bright, bold images that tell the story of the Texas restaurant world. We even deployed a playful new typeface (“Hello Beautiful”) that lends the TRA an extra splash of pizazz—something different, something novel.

Behind the scenes, we developed a robust array of functionality.

There are contact forms, news stories, and event calendars. And there are integrations with third-party tools like iMIS, which is being used for single sign-on—allowing members to access member-only content.

And finally, we placed the entire site on an expertly developed Drupal CMS, allowing the TRA Web team to efficiently manage their content by creating it once, then having it published in multiple places throughout the site.

The Dessert

Now, the 1.2 million restaurant professionals in Texas have a single, mobile-friendly, online hub for everything relevant to their work. The Texas Restaurant Association has staked its claim as one of the biggest, best, most member-focused professional associations in the country.